When Nothing Comes
Miss Bitsy, Creative Compost, and the Art of Trusting What Grows Underground
Yesterday I went looking for inspiration.
I took a nature walk.
The weather was pleasant. The trees were green. A few wildflowers were showing off. I found feathers. I noticed textures. I listened to birds. I watched two turtles sunbathe on a log.
I did all the right things.
I came home inspired.
And then absolutely nothing happened.
The page stayed stubbornly blank.
Well, not blank exactly.
Worse.
It filled with the same marks I’ve been making for weeks. The same muted greens and dusty pinks that I apparently cannot stop reaching for. The same little torn paper strips. The same layering. The same conversation going nowhere.
Like trying to say something important but only being able to repeat yourself.
I started gluing down random strips of paper.
I didn’t like how the colors and textures talked to each other.
I threw it in the burn pile.
I know.
Very dramatic of me.
That’s when Miss Bitsy arrived.
You may know Miss Bitsy.
She is the self-appointed Assistant Superintendent of Creative Affairs.
She dresses like a retired school administrator. She carries a clipboard. Her silver bouffant never moves, even in strong wind. She has opinions. She has procedures. She clucks her tongue when she disapproves.
Which is often.
Well, said Miss Bitsy, making a note on her clipboard, perhaps this is simply who you are now.
Perhaps you’ve used up your interesting ideas.
Perhaps the walk didn’t work because you are not the kind of person walks work for anymore.
Perhaps you’ve reached the end of your creative range.
She paused as she looked around with a sniff.
Have you considered cleaning your art studio lately?
I made another piece.
It looked exactly like the one in the burn pile.
Miss Bitsy didn’t even look up from her clipboard.
Mm-hmm, she said.
I’m tired of the same colors. The same patterns. The same visual conversation that loops endlessly back to where it started.
Every piece I have tried making lately has felt like a photocopy of the one before it.
Not bad enough to be interesting.
Not good enough to be exciting.
Just...
blah.
And blah, it turns out, is very hard to defend against.
Blah just sits there.
Blah mocks you.
If you’ve ever sat in front of a canvas, sketchbook, journal, manuscript, quilt, camera, pottery wheel, or knitting project wondering where all the magic went, I suspect you know this feeling.
And I suspect you have your own version of Miss Bitsy.
Maybe yours wears different clothes.
Maybe yours has a different voice.
But she’s there.
Standing beside your creative practice with a clipboard and a disappointing amount of confidence.
It feels like standing at a dry well.
You keep lowering the bucket.
The bucket comes back empty.
And if I’m being fair, there may be another factor at work here.
This week I wrapped up narrating a nonfiction book about how writing works.
Now I’m beginning another nonfiction audiobook for parents about helping children navigate anxiety and the challenges of everyday life with picky eaters.
I’m grateful for the work.
Truly.
The booth has been busy, and in a creative career there is something comforting about deadlines. They keep you moving forward when motivation decides to take a day off.
But books require attention.
Narration requires attention.
Listening requires attention.
Thinking requires attention.
And attention, it turns out, is not an unlimited resource.
I’ve mostly recovered from the four-generation girls trip to Florida and back, though I suspect some of that travel tiredness is still hanging around in the corners.
The old grey mare isn’t what she used to be.
I don’t bounce back from long trips the way I did twenty years ago.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I’ve also been trying to carve out time to continue writing my next book.
And lately I’ve found myself wondering:
Maybe I’m doing too much.
Maybe nothing is wrong with my creativity at all.
Maybe something simply needs a season of rest.
Or at least a season of less.
Miss Bitsy does not care for this theory.
According to Miss Bitsy, if a thing is important, you simply work harder.
Push more.
Try harder.
Stay up later.
Produce faster.
Cross more items off the list.
Miss Bitsy has never once suggested a nap.
I find this suspicious.
Because when I look honestly at my days, I see a brain that has been working very hard.
I see words flowing out through narration.
Words flowing out through writing.
Words flowing out through planning and problem solving and creating.
Perhaps what feels like a lack of creativity is sometimes simply creative fatigue.
Not broken.
Not blocked.
Just tired.
The trouble is that tiredness can disguise itself as failure.
It whispers that you’ve lost your touch.
That you’ve run out of ideas.
That you’ll never finish the next book.
That everyone else is creating more than you are.
That if the pages aren’t filling quickly, they may never fill at all.
The frustrating part—the thing I have to remind myself when Miss Bitsy is being particularly convincing—is that we often assume inspiration and creativity are the same thing.
They aren’t.
Inspiration is noticing.
Creativity is translating.
And sometimes there is a lag between the two.
The walk worked.
I noticed things.
I came home with my pockets full of observations—the particular curve of a feather’s spine, the way lichen makes a rock look ancient, the way two turtles managed to look simultaneously prehistoric and deeply relaxed.
Maybe the problem is that my hands aren’t quite ready yet.
The ideas haven’t quite finished developing yet..
Creative people often panic during this stage.
We mistake incubation for failure.
We assume that because nothing interesting appeared on the page today, nothing interesting is happening.
Miss Bitsy is very good at encouraging this assumption.
But some of the most important creative work happens underground.
Seeds spend a surprisingly long time blending into the dirt.
Roots grow before leaves appear.
Stories gather before they speak.
Images assemble themselves quietly before they announce what they want to become.
The older I get, the more I suspect creativity has seasons.
There are blooming seasons when ideas arrive faster than we can capture them. Everything you touch turns into something. The pages fill up. You go to bed excited. You wake up excited.
You feel slightly larger than your own life.
And then there are composting seasons.
Nobody puts the compost pile on the cover of the gardening magazine.
It’s not glamorous.
It’s not beautiful.
It’s messy.
It looks questionable.
It smells a little suspicious.
You don’t really want visitors to witness this.
But without it, next season doesn’t happen.
Lately my creative practice has felt a little compost-y.
The pages aren’t terrible.
They’re just familiar.
The marks know where they’re going before I make them.
The colors know their places.
The shapes mimic each other.
And perhaps that’s the problem.
Or, says Miss Bitsy, perhaps you’ve plateaued.
Thank you, Miss Bitsy.
That’s enough from you.
Here’s what I actually think is true.
Sometimes creativity doesn’t need more inspiration.
Sometimes it needs more surprise.
A wrong turn.
A color you dislike.
A tool you’ve never used.
A page that turns out ugly on purpose.
A rule broken just to see what happens.
A willingness to make something that doesn’t work and follow it all the way to the end anyway.
Miss Bitsy hates this idea.
She prefers forms.
Checklists.
Reasonable outcomes.
She believes every creative act should lead somewhere productive.
She is deeply suspicious of experimentation.
She is wrong about this.
The truth is that creativity is not a machine.
You cannot insert one nature walk and expect one finished collage to come out the other side.
If only it worked that way.
If it did, we’d all have a completed checklist:
Take walk.
Observe feather.
Notice interesting tree bark.
Return home.
Create masterpiece.
Instead, creativity is far more mysterious and far less efficient.
It wanders.
It collects.
It eavesdrops.
It pockets things for later.
A color seen on a wildflower today may not appear in your work for three months.
A shape noticed on a turtle shell might quietly show up in a pattern years from now.
A sentence overheard in a coffee shop may become the opening line of a story long after you’ve forgotten where you first heard it.
Creative work has roots we rarely get to see.
That’s what Miss Bitsy forgets.
She only counts the visible things.
The finished pages.
The completed projects.
The pieces worthy of sharing.
She does not count the noticing.
She does not count the wondering.
She does not count the walks.
She does not count the days when all you do is pay attention.
But I am beginning to suspect those things count the most.
Because every creative life is built from thousands of small acts of noticing.
A feather.
A shadow.
The sound of wind moving through leaves.
Two turtles sunbathing on a log as if they have nowhere else to be.
A color combination that catches your eye.
A question that follows you home.
None of these things look important in the moment.
Yet somehow they become the raw materials of a creative life.
For now, I am trying to trust the process.
The walk mattered.
The noticing mattered.
The turtles mattered.
The feather mattered.
The moment I stopped to watch sunlight shimmer across the pond mattered.
The pile of uninspiring artwork on my table matters too.
The blah piece that ended up in the burn pile mattered too.
Because creativity is not only what we make.
It is also how we pay attention.
And sometimes paying attention is the work.
Sometimes gathering is the work.
Sometimes waiting is the work.
Sometimes the most creative thing we can do is trust that something is happening beneath the surface, even when we cannot yet see it.
Miss Bitsy finds this deeply unsatisfying.
She would prefer a spreadsheet.
I, however, am learning to believe in roots.
That things are happening underground that will sprout something beautiful and unique in the future.
I know better than to believe the next book won’t get written.
It will happen one chapter at a time.
One page at a time.
One paragraph at a time.
One tiny act of showing up at a time.
And the cycle will repeat.
Not all at once.
Not on my preferred schedule.
Not according to Miss Bitsy’s checklist.
But eventually.
The pages will come.
They always do.
Not every walk becomes a painting.
Not every observation becomes a poem.
Not every idea arrives fully formed.
Sometimes inspiration is simply gathering material for a future version of yourself.
A version who will look at that feather, that wildflower, that interesting shadow, that memory of two turtles sunbathing like they had nowhere else to be—and suddenly know exactly what to do with it.
For now, I am trying to trust the process.
Even when nothing seems to be happening.
Especially then.
Because creativity is not only what blooms.
Creativity is also what waits.
And Miss Bitsy, for all her confidence and clipboard management skills, has absolutely no idea what’s growing underground.
What’s growing inside me.
I eventually ended up doing what I always do when my inner critic gets loud and obnoxious. I painted her.
Miss Bitsy in all her glory burning my art pieces.
That got me back on track with my illustrator self.
The gestural, intuitive artist in me is apparently taking a nap.
Wherever you find yourself this week—in bloom, in compost, or somewhere in between—I hope you find a little room for wonder.
Until next time,
Jenn